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They don't grow a lot of sugar cane in Vancouver. But it's been an integral part of the local economy for 120 years through the BC Sugar Refinery.

The complex on the East Van waterfront dates to 1890, when the City of Vancouver was only four years old.

The refinery's ancient brick warehouse along the CPR railway tracks is Vancouver's most familiar industrial site. But there is a whole world you can't see from the street, hidden behind the brick buildings.

The BC Sugar property is 13.5 acres, and includes 20 buildings, a dock and a little park. There are a couple of art deco buildings from the 1940s, a 1950s-modern office building, and a 300-foot long, 50-foot high storage facility packed with mountains of raw sugar. When you walk through it the air is thick with sugar — when you come out you feel like you've been skim-coated in the stuff.

BC Sugar is still a fully functioning refinery, producing between 100,000 and 120,000 metric tonnes of sugar annually. That's almost 10 per cent of Canada's sugar output.

The complex also has become a favourite spot for film shoots, with more than 120 productions having been shot there in recent years, ranging from TV series like Dark Angel to features like Cat Woman and music videos like REM's Animal.

"Producers come up from California and just go 'Whoa!'" laughs longtime employee John Symons. "I want to shoot here!"

Public access to the site has been cut off because of Port of Vancouver restrictions. B, but you can get in if you have business at the refinery, and Symons recently took us for a tour.

The refinery was the brainchild of Benjamin Tingley Rogers, an American who learned the business from his father in Philadelphia and New Orleans, then studied and worked in Boston and New York.

According to John Schreiner's company history The Refiners, Rogers was in Montreal working for another sugar company when he saw the economic benefits of starting a sugar refinery on the Canadian west coast, where you could bring in raw sugar from Australia, Asia or Central America by ship and refine it for the booming western Canadian market.

In the company cafeteria is a copy of a letter from the 24-year-old Rogers to Vancouver Mayor David Oppenheimer and city council. Written on Hotel Vancouver stationary and dated Jan. 27, 1890, it proposed to erect a sugar refinery "constructed of brick in the most substantial manner" within a mere eight months.

But there was a catch. Rogers wanted the city to provide him with waterfront land, give him a $40,000 grant, and offer free water for 15 years.

Council reduced the grant to $30,000, but acquiesced to his other demands, including paying $15,525 for the refinery site, which had been owned by Mayor Oppenheimer's Vancouver Improvement Company.

Council had another stipulation: that Rogers not hire any Chinese workers. In the 1890s, there was a lot of controversy about Chinese and Asian immigration because Asian labourers were paid less than white workers.

A few years ago, a collector unearthed a racist poster hidden in the walls of an 1895 house. It portrayed a Chinese labourer hauling sugar for 10 cents per day, and a white labourer rolling a wheelbarrow loaded with barrels labelled BC Sugar for two dollars a day.

"Chinese Industry, Coolie Labour or Home Industry, White Labour," it read. "Use only sugars refined in our own country."

Rogers agreed not to hire any Chinese, got the land and grant, then raised another $160,000 from backers like William Van Horne and Donald Smith of the CPR. The first sugar came out of the refinery on Jan. 16, 1891.

BC Sugar would make B.T. Rogers a very wealthy man; he built two landmark mansions that still stand, Gabriola on Davie Street and Shannon on Granville. He died in 1918, but his family continued to run the company for decades. It is now part of Lantic Sugar, a public company headquartered in Montreal, but the Rogers name survives in brands like Rogers Sugar and Rogers Golden Corn Syrup.

The refinery site was built up in stages, as was the waterfront property — much of the current land was water that has been filled in.

None of the original refinery buildings seem to have survived, but there are a couple of small buildings that were built in the 1890s, including the first "melt house," where molasses is extracted from raw sugar, the first step in the refining process. It now houses the cafeteria on the main floor and offices above.

The other 1890s building is a maintenance facility. It looks like an old barn.

The brick warehouse along the railway tracks was built up in stages, starting in 1903. If you look closely, you can see that it's actually three separate buildings that have been joined together. You can tell where they separate because they have different types of windows — the east and west buildings have 16 panes, while the middle one has five.

The brick warehouses also have a gentle curve to them that follows the railway tracks. The insides have been painted white, and the arched windows go from the floor to the ceiling. The windows face south, which brings in tons of light, but makes the buildings incredibly hot in the summer. There are no windows at the back, so there is no cross-breeze.

Generations of Vancouverites have longed to take over the building as living space. Symons has worked in virtually every part of the refinery since he started at BC Sugar when he was 18, and reckons the best spot would be in the rooftop perch they call "the old number one lab," home of the painted "The British Columbia Sugar Refining Co. Ltd." sign.

"I've often joked when I retire I'm going to stay here and turn that into a condo and live there," says Symons, 59. "It's got the view."

The view is spectacular, a sweeping vista of East Van. It's also quite easy to imagine the old warehouses as cool lofts, because most of the upper floors are empty — most of the bagged sugar is now stored in a modern building.

The old warehouses have a quirk that shows their age — the wooden beams on the bottom floors are much bigger than the beams on the upper floors, because they are supporting more weight. The beams are only 10 feet apart on the bottom, which makes it feel like you're in an indoor forest.

Arched entrances have been cut through the old sides of the three buildings, so they seem like one continuous space. You get from floor to floor via an ancient cage elevator, and here and there you run across some machinery that looks like it dates to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

There is all sorts of incredible industrial machinery in the complex. In the filter house, where impurities are filtered out of liquefied sugar, they use the same type of machines they used back in B.T. Rogers' day.

"These are called Sweetland presses," explains Symons. "They're old technology, 1800s technology. The reason why we stuck with these is because there's 72 separate filters, cloth, that we can filter the liquid through to take out solid impurities.

"The newer, modern filters you see in the wine industry, they're all one outlet from the filter. This way we have 72 different filters all operating in tandem."

The presses aren't 120 years old, though. Over the years, the originals started to wear out, so BC Sugar had the Sweetland factory recast reproduction models in 1997.

"When we took [the old presses] out we had these guys that made the Dallas Cowboys look like kindergarten kids rolling these things along railway tracks," recounts Symons.

"They built this track with Teflon and they were rolling them along and then out the door, [before] flying them down to the ground with cranes."

That was small potatoes compared to replacing one of the giant "pan" cylinders in the pan house, where the liquid sugar is boiled until sugar crystals are formed and passed into driers, the final step in refining.

"We actually took the roof off [the pan house] and lifted that vessel up and [over] the roof," says Symons. "That was a big project. As that was going on we had two cranes with a spreader beam."

The pan house was built in 1960 and is the tallest building in the complex, about 100 feet high. The "pans" are on the top floor, which is double height. The pan house wouldn't make great condos, though — there are only a couple of windows.

The giant pans in the pan house aren't all that exciting to see, either. The most entertaining assembly lines are the "individual serving envelope station," where they fill up those tiny sugar packets you get in restaurants, and the sugar cube station, where a steaming drum rolls around and around, pressing out zillions of sugar cubes.

"Someone has to bear the major responsibility of knowing that he is producing the entire cube production for all of Canada," Symons laughs.

The site has its own steam plant housed in a 1941 art deco building. It has its own sewer grates, which read "BC Sugar." It even has its own sugar museum, housed in an old garage built in 1916.

The museum has been closed for several years, but is still completely intact. It contains all sorts of artifacts: a model of the 1890 refinery, a Dominican sugar machete with a handmade sheath, and a "ladies pay envelope" from 1941, when a worker made $13.85 for a 40-hour week.

Incredibly, it also contains the original BC Sugar stock certificates issued to William Van Horne and Donald Smith of the CPR, dating to Oct. 17. 1890. Van Horne brought the railway across Western Canada; Smith drove the Last Spike at Craigellachie near Revelstoke. As Canadiana, it's pure gold — just like the British Columbia Sugar Refinery.

jmackie@vancouversun.com

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